Here are the notes from last night's little hotfix.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Hotfixes (Jul. 29, 2014)

• There will now be stricter evaluation of movement cheating in Frontline.
  
• The Elite Mark Bill has been adjusted so that when it is updated the same monster will not be the targeted mark two weeks in a row.
  
• An issue in ”The Striking Tree (Extreme)” wherein the text indicating the “Treasure Coffer” is in Japanese.
  
• Certain Achievement texts in “The Hunt” have been revised.

Nothing too exciting here, but then again it was only a hotfix. A lot of people were expecting huge nerfs/buffs to Hunts, but all they did was make it so you can't have Naul two weeks in a row. lol.

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I don't participate in hunts unless one of the NMs happens to spawn in front of me when I am botanizing (I've killed 3 total omg,) but why would there be a huge buff to them??? It seems like people are having no issues at all upgrading full sets of gear within a week that would take over 2 months in a successful coil group. I'm perplexed by this. I guess it's just more people wanting bigger handouts? Don't hunts seem kind of like the "welfare cheque" of FFXIV already? Lol

I don't know about that. what restrictions would you put on them? How about only allowing you to purchase 3 books a week?

Hunts seem like a pain in the ass, those people who are getting "full sets of gear" within a week are the hardcore group more than casuals. they are the ones running around in circles waiting for rank S to pop.

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Take my hand, brave adventurer. We face this dungeon together - with FRIENDSHIP!

Hunts take no skill. Hunts only take a time commitment of a week of grind. It's welfare. The end.

I don't see it as a big deal anyways. Its all about that glorious CT2 gear anyways

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Take my hand, brave adventurer. We face this dungeon together - with FRIENDSHIP!

dont sands of time still only come from coil?

People like Ket have complained a few times about getting shit rewards for their attempts at hunts.

I think Murph put it best when he said, "Casual players have access to hunts, but casual players aren't doing hunts."

I wouldn't argue that it's "hard" from a skill requirement, but it takes organization from an enmity standpoint. i.e. don't have a party full of WHM's trying to DPS in cleric stance, or whatever. haha

As for the wellfare thing, I dunno. Patches after coil are always catch up patches. I'm not really sure why this is surprising anyone. But moreso...

I believe the purchasing of sands/oil was basically S-E's way of admitting they screwed the pooch on how they handled coil two's token system. 2 of each per week for a full clear of coil? That seems pretty terrible. It's taking people longer in 2.2/2.3 to get to max iLvl than it did in 2.0, and that includes Coil raiders.

In 2.0, you were getting i90s from coil and i90's from Myth.

In 2.2, you were getting i110s from coil and i100s from Soldiery. And so if you weren't lucky with the coil drops (and weren't a job getting preferential treatment to oils/sands to make clears easier), you are seeing yourself get to i110 much slower in 2.2 than you were in getting to i90 in 2.0

That is a problem with coil and s-e's handling of it. I believe hunts were trying to alleviate some of that, because people need to get up to i110 before 2.4 and coil 3 comes out. This patch is purely about trying to play catch up. Sure, a side-effect of it is letting non-coil people upgrade their soldiery purchases, but how is that any different from letting players buy i90 myth items right off the bat in 2.0? They had to wait 3 months to get to that point in 2.2, something raiders should be happy about.

Anyone who says it's easier for casuals to get to i110 than it was for casuals to get to i90 is simply not remembering how 2.0 worked.

i90 weapon = 3 weeks of myth capping
i110 weapon = 3 weeks of of soldiery capping + a turn 7 kill + a turn 8 kill (OR) 3 weeks of soldiery capping + waiting 3 months + zerging and/or ct2 farming

i90 gear = AK farming (for casuals) (OR) AK farming + coil farming (for raiders - gearing you faster and getting you true BiS if RNG was in your favor)
i110 gear = Coil 2 farming, or Soldiery grinding + waiting 3 months

Call it wellfare if you want, I guess. But it's a catch up patch, and it did force casual players to wait 3 months to start getting the items.

If you guys are pissed that after doing coil for 3 months, there's now a system that lets you easily upgrade your soldiery to 110, don't get mad at the players doing it, get mad at S-E for how they decided to handle gear for coil 2 in 2.2. That's the main issue there.

Maybe the'll fix it with 2.4, but if they simply do a copy of 2.2, then expect a bunch more wellfare epics in 2.5.

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You're not going to ever change my opinion LoLoL

what if hunts dropped m&ms instead? oh god what would you do?

Best I can do is skittles.

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Take my hand, brave adventurer. We face this dungeon together - with FRIENDSHIP!

LOL

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Well...they don't drop m&m's and if they did, I doubt they'd be as awesome as the kiddie pool DL has filled for me in his basement.

I'm sure its awesome as long as you rub the lotion on your skin. otherwise you get the hose again.

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Take my hand, brave adventurer. We face this dungeon together - with FRIENDSHIP!

You're really reaching if you think SE intended this. If you do the actual marks each day/week, it would take 2-3 months to get a sand. Instead, some people get that in a day or two. The difference is pretty glaring. It's like doing an obstacle course. SE meant to put a stool to help the short people over the wall. Instead they installed an escalator.

Also, as ket said, why hold back sands from ct if you wanted to let people catch up on i110 gear.

No, this s just another case of SE's willful ignorance and inability to realize that the people aren't going to only play as they intended.

The CT2 thing is a good point. I suppose if they were just wanting to hand out sands, then they would have done so in CT2, as well. That being said, they did say they were going to put them in CT2, but then mothballed the idea (I believe) after they realized hunts turned out the way that they did.

Now a few points of my own. Sure, you can say S-E put in the hunt system, thinking no one would ever Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis the idea of killing a monster outside of the weekly hunt posting (despite the fact only B-Rank monsters show up there). So I guess they could have implemented the hunt system assuming A-rank and S-rank monsters were just going to chill up 24/7 until the servers go offline.

Or, more realistically, they expected people to kill them.

Hell, even on day 1, or 2, when I pointed out it'd take 3 weeks to get an Alexandrite with the new hunt method (7 Seals/Day + 20 seals/Week), the counterpoint given by everyone was "Job board marks are just a bonus. You're supposed to go out and just wander around, killing them)

I'm sorry if you feel that it should take entire content patch cycle (3 months) to farm a sand with an Allied seal. The absurdity of that statement alone is it's best counter-argument.

So I guess S-E's true intentions lie somewhere in the middle.

They didn't expect someone to get 3 sands in one night (Technically possible by getting max contribution on 136 A-Rank spawns over the course of 24 hours... a.k.a. Not happening)

They also didn't honestly expect it to take 11 weeks to get a Sand of Time (69 marks a week, going into a 750 mark purchase)

So somewhere in between those two extremes is what S-E wanted.

What we do know, however, is there have been two hotfixes for Hunts, in which both times people smuggly stated it was going to get nerfed because it "wasn't right", only to have it be buffed in one and not impacted by the other.

So yah, my statement saying they admitted they screwed up in coil may not be 100% accurate. The fact that Corwin has farmed more sands than me (while arguing against me) seems to show there may be some merit to my comment that the sand/oil situation of coil was stupid.

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You're still attributing SE with foresight and planning that they've never displayed before

Did SE fuck up with coil? In my opinion , yes.

Is it easier to get sands through hunt? Yes

Does that mean hunts are a well thoughout solution from SE? Absolutely not.

Of course I'm going to take the easier route to sands. That doesn't mean I think this was a good solution. It just means it's the easier route to take.


And I never said I wanted it to take 3 months to get a sand, just that that was the base effort it would take to get a sands. The marks were the most advertised part of the hunts. If I were to guess, a and a ranks were supposed to be additional source of seals, not the primary. So yes, I agree their intentions were somewhere in the middle. But not seeing that's players would just farm a and a ranks non stop was just stupid.

Also, they didn't remove sands from ct. They said it was only going to be added at a later date, most likely 2.35. This was announced long before 2.3 came out. Why would they do that if they were just going to have hunts flood the server with sands?

lol... Yah, I mean I guess I'm not trying to give S-E too much credit, but I was giving them a little. Like you said, however, it's probably not warranted.

What S-E probably didn't count on was people waiting for others and trying to down hunts collectively. They probably assumed that it'd be cuthroat, in spite of the fact it wouldn't be as beneficial. So yah, probably a big, glaring oversight on S-E's fault.

I must have misread the CT2 info. I could have sworn someone had mentioned it, but I was obviously confused. I don't mind them dropping from CT2, of course.

But in general, I really don't know what a good solution is for the sands.

With vertical gear progression, S-E needs to provide a way for players to quickly catch up to their friends. We saw it with the continual ease of myth accumulation, the Coil 1 echo, and now the zergfest for oils/sands. This will always be the case.

I guess they could have waited until 2.4 for it, but then they'd have had to make it even easier to acquire, as the gear wouldn't even be max iLvl anymore. And in all honesty, I'm sure sands/oils will be made even easier to acquire after 2.4.

It still has taken longer to get to max iLvl in 2.2-2.3 than it did in 2.0, though (For coil raiders and especially for non-coil players), so while I can at least appreciate your frustration over it (if only just a little), it should in your eyes at least still be a step in the right direction.

It's not like Soldiery gear was i110 to begin with (like myth gear was i90 from day 1 and BiS in many cases).

Maybe they'll have a better method for 2.4. I'll go out on a limb and say that 2.5 will make getting to max iLvl easier than it will be in 2.4, though. Don't really need to be nostradamus to make that prediction, however.

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I give corwin's argument all my votes.

I don't see why they have to do any such thing. This isn't fucking Hello Kitty Island Adventure, where everyone gets a gold star, and we all get to sit around holding hands and singing kumbaya. It's a fucking MMO. We're here to explore dungeons, kill monsters, and get loot. I want epic fucking battles where we survive by the skin of our teeth and are rewarded with fucking legendary gear.

Other MMO's I've played either don't nerf old content, or they make you wait until the next expansion is out. SE is nerfing it after a couple months.

I much prefer EQ2's model: There are group dungeons and 24 man raids. Dungeons have a chance to drop top tier loot, but its super rare, and it was a once a day shot. Raids of course drop top tier loot as well, but guaranteed. This way there was motivation to do group dungeons, non-raiders had a chance for top tier gear, but raiders were still rewarded for doing the harder content. And with the next expansion, they would go back and nerf aspects of the old raids so other players could go experience them. Overall, I felt it was a lot more balanced for players of all levels.